Chapter 5

Sheena sat on the grass by herself and watched the tableau playing out before her eyes. Fawks Ulasso worked tirelessly skinning and cutting up the morlock. He wrapped the meat up in the skin along with some leaves he picked from the trees. He made the whole thing into a giant bundle except a large hunk of meat he cut from the animal's ribs.

The day sloped away toward afternoon. Fawks built a fire and cooked the rib meat on it while he finished cleaning up his butchering operation. No one came near him. The Simons girls stayed near Abigail. Ron stayed near Sophia, and Jasmine and Dana stayed near Rex, their new savior.

Sheena stayed by herself, but the longer she sat there watching, the more she knew she couldn't let this situation continue. Everyone could be as grateful as they liked to Fawks for plucking them from the jaws of death, but none of them would say a word to him.

In the end, her conscience got the better of her. She got to her feet and forced herself to approach him. He gave her his benign smile, but he didn't stop working. “How are you now, Sheena?”

“I'm fine. How are you, Fawks?”

“I'm very well.”

“I've been meaning to ask you about your Clan. This is supposed to be the Assan's territory, but you said you don't belong to that Clan. So, what are you doing around here?”

He shrugged. “I was just traveling around on my own. I was in the woods, and I came to see what all the noise was about. That's what I'm doing here.”

“Do the Assans know you're here?”

The innocent smile touching his lips changed. For the first time, Sheena recognized a genuine smile, and it wasn't innocent or benign. “No, they don't know I'm here.”

“Would they be happy to know you were this close to their Keep?”

He straightened up and faced her. “You're a smart woman, Sheena. I can see why they put you in charge.”

“I'm not in charge. Jasmine is Commanding Officer of this team. I'm just a shuttle pilot. I'm only here because our craft was knocked out of the sky by a....” She stopped.

He studied her, but when she didn't say anything else, he wiped his knife on the grass. “You're far from home, too. Tell me about the country you come from.”

She looked all around at the deep woods. “It's nothing like this. Our country is a series of space stations covering the whole galaxy. We have stations as big as cities, on planets, in orbit around stars—all over the place, really. We use high technology for everything. I don't think there is a forest like this on any of the Allies' worlds.”

“That's too bad. Good planets are hard to find.”

“You don't know the half of it.”

“My country is nothing like this, either.”

“It isn't? What's it like? I thought the whole planet was like this.”

“I come from the giant deserts to the south, near the equator. It's too hot to live on the surface, so we have enormous cities built underground. In fact, we have dozens of interconnected cities covering vast areas of thousands of miles.”

“That sounds amazing. Do many Clans live there?”

“The Ulasso is the only Clan that lives in that part of the planet, and we don't mix with the other Clans. We keep to ourselves. The other Clans gather so their young people can find mates from other Clans, but the Ulasso don't have to do that. We're so big we can marry within our own Clan without interbreeding. That way, we avoid gatherings with other Clans.”

“Is that why the Assans wouldn't be happy to know you're here? Are they hostile toward you?”

He laughed a deep rumbling laugh that boiled up from the center of his barrel chest. “The Assans can't touch me. No one can touch the Ulasso.”

“Just the same, maybe it's not such a good idea for you to take us to their Keep. It could cause trouble.”

He poked up the fire with a stick. He picked up the spearhead he cut out of the morlock's neck and washed the blood off it. He cut a new shaft and tied the head into a notch he carved in the end of it. “It could cause trouble for them, not for me.”

The sun slanted behind the trees, and the others migrated closer to the fire to get warm. Rex helped Ron carry Sophia closer, too. Sheena let her conversation with Fawks die, but her questions about him and his motives still nagged at her mind.

She watched him cut off pieces of meat and serve everyone with enough to satisfy their hunger. He brought them water from a nearby stream. When the meal ended, he sat down near the fire in the contented glow of evening.

Now that she knew something more about him, his appearance made more sense. The burning desert sun and heat must have created that white-blonde hair and clear white skin. Fawks radiated solar energy. He shone like the sun itself, white and hot.

His blue eyes skated around the circle. He examined every face in turn until he found Sheena staring at him. Sheena turned her eyes away. She couldn't look at him anymore. She couldn't hate him the way she wanted to, but she couldn't like him, either. He contradicted everything she knew and understood about people.

His words came back to her. The Assans can't touch me. No one can touch the Ulasso. What did that mean? She could believe it, looking at him. No one could touch him. He dwelt in an inviolate world where danger did not exist. What mere mortals considered dangerous never bothered him or his people. He came from a society of immortals.

One by one, the team fell asleep. Sheena found a piece of soft ground for herself somewhere away from the fire. She couldn't get comfortable around the rest of the team—and him. His radiant presence kept her awake and worried her with questions. The longer she thought about him, the more certain she became that he hadn't told the whole truth about where he came from or what he was doing there.

Just before she fell asleep, she overheard Jasmine talking to Ron about Sophia. “We can't exactly carry her the whole way. We could do her more harm than good, and it's rough ground. Carrying her will slow the whole team down, and we're already in danger out here, but I don't like leaving her behind.”

“We won't have to carry her very far. I'd be surprised if she survives the night.”

“And what will we do with her if she does die?”

“Leave her behind, of course. We're too far away from the shuttle to take her back there, and we can't take her with us. There's nothing else to do. It's a tragedy, but we'll just have to call her collateral damage.”

“At least you gave her a fighting chance. She would have bled to death if you hadn't saved her life.”

“I didn't save her life. I just prolonged the agony. I should have let her die.”

“Don't say that. You did your job.”

He nodded and went back to staring into the fire. A few minutes later, Abigail came over and took his hand. She led him off into the dark, and they didn't come back.

Sheena turned her back on the fire and closed her eyes. She must have dozed off thinking the situation over, because the snap of a stick startled her awake. She sat bolt upright to find Fawks standing over the fire.

He poked the smoldering coals, but he didn't feed it with more wood. He broke the twigs off a stout branch and made a pole to carry the bundle of food he'd made. He gave Sheena a very different smile this morning than yesterday. Who had he told about his home country? She could be the only person in their group who knew the first thing about him.

She got up and ran her fingers through her long blonde hair. She hated to think what she looked like after two days in this forest, but she couldn't think about that now. She swished her mouth out with water and accepted the roasted meat Fawks offered her for breakfast.

The rest of the group appeared in various states of dishevelment. Rex scowled at Fawks, who gave him back that innocent smirk. Anyone could see that smirk hid the real Fawks from anyone he didn't want to see it.

Who was he really? What was he really like when he let all his defenses down? He fascinated Sheena and horrified her all at once. She never met anyone in her life who disturbed her natural equilibrium this way.

After they ate and cleaned themselves up, Jasmine organized the group to move out. She stopped next to Ron squatted next to Sophia. “Come on, Ron. Let's get out of here.”

“We can't leave her behind. She's still alive.”

Jasmine's eyes popped open. “She is? You said...”

“Don't ask me how, but her heart is still beating. Her pulse is still thready and rapid, but as long as she's still alive, we have to take her along with us. We'll have to take turns carrying her, which means we'll have to build a stretcher to carry her.”

Jasmine looked around when Fawks came up to them with two strong staves in his hands. He laid them on either side of Sophia. Jasmine stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Building a stretcher for her. You'll need these to carry her.”

“But how did you know...?”

Sheena hung back and watched while Fawks tied some scraps of the morlock's skin back and forth between the staves to make a stretcher. He shoved it under Sophia while Ron and Rex rolled her onto her side.

“Dana and I will take the first shift carrying her,” Jasmine told Sheena. “You take the point today.”

“I think that job is already taken. Look.” Sheena nodded toward Fawks.

He shouldered the bundle of food he made and set off through the trees without looking back. Rex followed at his heels, and Abigail and the girls fell in line.

Dana and Jasmine hoisted up the stretcher. Sophia groaned and tossed her sweaty head back and forth, but she settled into the women's steady rhythmic pace and lay still. Ron stayed close to the stretcher.

That left Sheena to bring up the rear where she could think in peace and quiet. She let the group trail out in front of her and studied each person one after another. Ron worried over Sophia, but he long since gave up any hope for her survival. One more day wouldn't make any difference one way or the other.

Jasmine and Dana played their parts as Allies officers. They set the example for everyone else to keep their heads and rise to any challenge that came along. Sheena understood and admired them. She was one of them, an officer in the Allied Command. She knew better than anyone how to submerge her feelings under a firm exterior to get the job done with no fuss.

Abigail and the girls lived in another world. They wore their feelings on their sleeves and didn't even try to get the job done. Abigail never joined the Allied Command. Sheena didn't know what Abigail did for a job, but whatever it was had nothing to do with the world of power and dominance in which Sheena and her counterparts lived.

What kind of girls could a woman like Abigail raise? Most girls grew up to become scientists or officers in the Allied Command. They learned early to fight and take care of themselves. They learned to make decisions and command others. They took responsibility for themselves and the task at hand.

These girls didn't learn any of that from their mother the way most girls in the Allies did. If they didn't learn it fast, they would never get a decent position in the military hierarchy. They would be lost and useless like their mother.